(Rollin McCraty, 2015) (Daniel Friedland, 2016)
Coherent Leadership™ is an experiential learning program formed by combining leading-edge research in neuroscience with the need for new ways to lead and adapt in a world moving faster than ever before. Stress of global tensions and uncertainty with an emerging purpose-driven culture means that you need Coherent Leadership™. The program is a combination of 3 unique behavioral change programs designed to facilitate sustained cultural change within organizations.
What is Coherence?
Physiologically speaking, coherence is a state in which our immune, hormonal, and nervous systems function in a state of energetic coordination. It’s an optimal state where our hearts, minds, and emotions are aligned and in sync. Being in a coherent state helps build capacity in the physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional domains of resilience. We can better manage and recover from the stressors in our lives when we make a practice out of being coherent and using the state to self-regulate our emotions. Regulation of our emotions is essential to our overall health because emotions are the primary drivers of our physiology.
Coherence is also used in science to describe when separate entities or systems function harmoniously and in sync.
(Institute of HeartMath, 2014)
Imagine the possibilities when everyone in an organization works in a coherent state more often…
Frederic Laloux, who is well known for his book ‘Reinventing Organizations’ describes organizations as living entities. What could an organization accomplish if it functioned in energetic alignment?
Can you see how adding these skills would benefit your organization?
How the Program Works
The Coherent Leadership program brings the research from the lab to the workplace by providing participants with the experience of applying evidence-based techniques and strategies to real-world situations that matter to them, that they’re already working on.
Program One: The Resilience Advantage™
Participants learn to utilize the power of the heart to lower stress and improve performance. As shown in the illustration above, our hearts play a significant role in our cognitive performance. Simply put, how our brains function. Brain function determines our thoughts and behaviors, like how we communicate and make decisions. Research shows that there is far more information going up to the brain from the heart than the other way around. Utilizing the heart’s power through self-regulation dramatically improves our ability to manage stress and build our capacity to lead others through stressful times. The knowledge and skills gained in this program help participants connect with their highest selves and how they show up in service of the greater good. The heart is talking – are you listening?
Program Two: Activating the Heart of Teams™
This program builds on the self-regulation skills introduced in the Resilience Advantage to enhance our capacity to lead ourselves and others in a team environment to improve psychological safety and unlock collective wisdom. In this program, participants are taught the skills necessary to utilize the part of the brain that houses our social engagement system, as illustrated above. We visit the critical role of relationships in our lives and how the quality of those relationships determines our perceptions of the environments we’re in. Whether or not people view their work environment as friendly or hostile has a massive impact on the organization’s ability to retain people, collaborate, and meet objectives. The strategies and techniques shared in this program continue the momentum of sustained change by digging deep into awareness of suboptimal baselines and emotional memories that leave us stuck in a rut of behaviors and attitudes that skew our perceptions.
Program Three: Awakening Conscious Leadership™
Participants are provided with a robust framework for elevating leadership capacity to effectively lead themselves and others up the hierarchy of needs in the face of challenges. As shown in the above illustration, this capacity liberates spirals of creativity within an organization where people feel safe meeting challenges by learning, connecting with others, expressing potential, being of service, creating opportunities, experiencing significance, and leaving a legacy. This program focuses on utilizing the area of the brain involved in finding meaning and purpose in our lives. In finding meaning and purpose, we can work from a place of significance that leads us to seek out what matters most to reframe the depleting energies of stress and self-doubt into an energizing challenge-response to solve problems collaboratively.
What makes Coherent Leadership™ a Practical Solution?
Sustained behavioral change on a social scale starts from within each individual by changing (or re-wiring) healthier physiological baseline responses to the stressors in our lives. More to the point, according to Rollin McCratey, the Director of Research at the HeartMath® Institute, “… without establishing a new baseline, it’s impossible to have sustained change in our health and emotional experience”.
(HeartMath Institute, 2018)
Many neuroscience studies reveal the relationship between a mammal and the environment it lives in affects the development of its physiological responses. Guest columnist for the Association of Psychological Science Nalini Ambady writes, “… the representations created in the brain in turn influence how we interact with and shape our own environments. Culture impacts the way in which the brain is wired and activated, but the brain is malleable. Much like the changing tide can erode a footprint in the sand, so too can changing experiences over time reshape these brain activations. In this sense, the brain can be seen as a “cultural sponge” of sorts, absorbing the regularities of our surrounding physical and social environments.” (Ambady, 2011)With the information above in mind, the culture of a workplace can be defined as shared, everyday habits. Using self-regulation to improve our behavior will improve our environment, further supporting the re-wiring of our physiological responses and, ultimately, the way we perceive workplace culture.
Safety research has long demonstrated that 70% of workplace incidents can be attributed to breakdowns in communication. High incident rates = poor culture, due to a perception that no one in an organization cares to look out for one another. We stress because we care… and 40% of turnover is due to stress (SuperSmartHealth, 2013). Regardless of how well a safety & health program looks on paper, if it’s not communicated through leadership’s actions, it will not function as intended to lower the organization’s risk and keep people safe. A powerfully insightful communication model developed by behavioral psychologist Dr. Albert Mehrabian, known as Mehrabian’s Rule, suggests that 55% of communication is received through observing body language. In other words, we communicate most effectively through our actions. The remaining 38% is through tone and vocal signal, and only 7% is through words. When this model is employed as part of a strategy to improve an organization’s culture (a strategy like the Coherent Leadership™ program), it is clear how vital sustained behavioral change is to improvement (Michail, 2020).
What are some Measurable Benefits?
What gets measured gets improved. Improvements are tracked pre-during, and post-program implementation by validated assessment tools in parallel with an organization’s current performance tracking initiatives. This program is for organizations wanting to improve their bottom line by positively impacting their people, their communities, and the world.
An organization that intentionally leads people up the hierarchy of needs can expect to experience spirals of creativity that improve many factors including:
- retention
- morale
- engagement
- injury/incident rates, and
- productivity
